The multifarious methods of oppression employed by
an oppressor state would fill an encyclopedia.
One general method is the control of language,
including rhetorical devices. A specific
figure is euphemism, one of many
effective linguistic devices designed to
hide the truth. For example, our
government has rebranded US
state assassination as “high value targeting.”

If
any subject links these drone newsletters with other newsletter subjects, it is
violence,
particularly US
violence, its complexity, and how to reduce it. “Make World Less Violent, New UA Graduates
Told.” (ADG 12-16-12). OMNI, you and
I, are engaged in basic work of proselytizing, of converting people, especially
people with power, from violence to nonviolence.

Write or Call the White House

President
Obama has declared his commitment to creating the most open and accessible
administration in American history. That begins with taking comments and
questions from you, the public, through our website.

Call
the President

PHONE NUMBERS

Comments:
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Office: 202-456-2121

Write a letter to
the President

Here are a
few simple things you can do to make sure your message gets to the White House
as quickly as possible.

1.If possible,email us!
This is the fastest way to get your message to President Obama.

2.If you write a letter,
please consider typing it on an 8 1/2 by 11 inch sheet of paper. If you
hand-write your letter, please consider using pen and writing as neatly as
possible.

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address, please consider including that as well.

4.And finally, be sure to
include the full address of the White House to make sure your message gets to
us as quickly and directly as possible:

Ads related toDrones in Arkansas

Demonstration draws participants
from across U.S.
and around the world

The ANSWER Coalition
joined CodePink and other anti-war organizations on Nov. 15 for a march from
the White House to General Atomics in protest of the U.S. government's use of drones.
The protest was the kick-off event for a weekend of anti-war activities
focusing on drone warfare, including the 2013 Drone Summit.

Speakers at the White
House included a delegation from Yemen
who spoke about the impact of U.S.
drones on their country. The group then marched to the D.C. office of General
Atomics, the company that manufacturers the Reaper and Predator drones flown
by the U.S.
government. A reading of names of drone victims from Yemen and Pakistan took place at both the
White House and General Atomics, and the event was concluded with a symbolic
die-in at General Atomics.

Thank you for signing up to stream "Unmanned: America's
Drone Wars"

Like all of our previous films, this one is
made to help create social change. From Outfoxed to Wal-mart to Rethink: Afghanistan to
Koch Brothers Exposed, we have worked together using these films to change
hearts, minds and policy.

Thanks to a
generous donor, we're able to provide this film for FREE for a limited time!
Who else do you think needs to see this film? Can we count on you to send themthis linkand ask them to sign up to watch this
important film? Are there friends or family members
that can help us spread the word, people in the media, elected officials,
people who disagree with us on this issue? With your help we can educate
and engage enough people and work to change the U.S. drone policy.

The documentary is available to stream for
FREE for a limited time. Let's work together to make sure others are receiving
this documentary for FREE.
Thank you for your support. War
Costs

MOYERS & CO., UNMANNED

Focused on the first part of the film: Tariq
Azis, his cousin killed by CIA drone, then Tariq killed. Neither by judge or jury. Primacy of killing the enemy inevitably
results in killing innocent people.
Write to Moyers at BillMoyers.com.

'Wounds of Waziristan':
Exclusive Broadcast of New Film on Pakistanis Haunted by U.S. Drone War

The Pakistani government is
warning of a new rift with the United
States after a CIA drone strike that killed
the head of the Pakistani Taliban. Hakimullah Mehsud and six other militants
died on Friday when U.S.
missiles hit their vehicle in North Waziristan.
Mehsud had a $5 million bounty on his head and was accused of responsibility
for thousands of deaths. The attack came just as the Pakistani government had
relaunched peace talks with the Taliban.

In a broadcast exclusive,Democracy Now!airs
a documentary that highlights the stories of civilians directly impacted by
drone attacks in Pakistan:
"Wounds of Waziristan," directed by
Madiha Tahir. "Waziristan is only half the size of New Jersey. How would it
feel if bombs rained over New Jersey
for nine years?" asks Tahir in the film. "Would you be frightened? If
they killed your son, your cousin or your husband, and got away with it, would
you be angry? You probably couldn’t forget about it if you tried. You’d be
haunted."

After a drone strike
had reportedly killed Pakistani Taliban leader Hakimullah Mehsud Nov. 1, the
spokesperson for the U.S. National Security Council declared that, if true, it
would be “a serious loss” for the terrorist organization.

That reaction
accurately reflected the Central Intelligence Agency’s argument for the strike.
But the back story of the episode is how
President Barack Obama supported the parochial interests of the CIA in the
drone war over the Pakistani government’s effort to try a new political
approach to that country’s terrorism crisis.

The failure of both
drone strikes and Pakistani military operations in the FATA tribal areas to stem
the tide of terrorism had led to a decision by Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to
try a political dialogue with the Taliban.

But the drone strike
that killed Mehsud stopped the peace talks before they could begin.

Pakistani Interior
Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan immediately denounced the drone strike that
killed Mehsud as “a conspiracy to sabotage the peace talks.” He charged that
the United States
had “scuttled” the initiative “on the eve, 18 hours before a formal delegation
of respected ulema [Islamic clerics] was to fly to Miranshah and hand over this
formal invitation.”

An unidentified State
Department official refused to address the Pakistani minister’s criticism,
declaring coolly that the issue was “an internal matter for Pakistan”.

Three different Taliban
commanders told Reuters Nov. 3 they had been preparing for the talks but after
the killing of Mehsud, they now felt betrayed and vowed a wave of revenge
attacks.

The strategy of
engaging the Taliban in peace talks, which was supported by the unanimous
agreement of an “All Parties Conference” on Sept. 9, was not simply an
expression of naïvete about the Taliban as was suggested by a Nov. 3 New York
Times article on the Pakistani reaction to the drone strike.

A major weakness of
the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan
(TTP) lies in the fact that it is a coalition of as many as 50 groups, some of
whose commanders are less committed to the terrorist campaign against the
Pakistani government than others. In the aftermath of the Mehsud killing,
several Taliban militants told Reuters that some Taliban commanders were still
in favour of talks with the government.

The most important success achieved by Pakistan in countering Taliban
violence in the past several years has been to reach accommodations with
several militant leaders who had been allied with the Taliban but agreed to
oppose Taliban attacks on government officials and security forces.

Sharif and other
Pakistani officials were well aware that the United States could unilaterally
prevent such talks from taking place by killing Mehsud or other Taliban leaders
with a drone strike.

The government lobbied
the United States in
September and October to end its drone war in Pakistan – or at least to give the
government a period of time to try its political strategy.

Obama had already
suggested in a May 23 speech at NationalDefenceUniversity
that the need for the strikes was fast diminishing and would soon end, because
there were very few high value targets left to hit, and because the U.S. would be withdrawing troops from Afghanistan.
In August, Secretary of State John Kerry had said the end might come “very,
very soon.”

After the meeting
with Sharif on Oct. 23, Obama said they had agreed to cooperate in “ways that
respect Pakistan’s
sovereignty, that respect the concerns of both countries” and referred
favourably to Sharif’s efforts to “reduce these incidents of terrorism.”

Shortly after the
meeting, Sharif’s adviser on national security and foreign affairs, Sartaj
Aziz, said in an interview with Al Jazeera that the Obama administration had
promised to “consider” the prime minister’s request to restrain drone attacks
while the government carried out a political dialogue.

A “senior Pakistani
official” told the Express Tribune that Obama had “assured Premier Nawaz that
drone strikes would only be used as a last option” and that he was planning to
end the drone war once “a few remaining targets” had been eliminated.

The official said the
Pakistani government now believed the unilateral strikes would end in “a matter
of months.”

But Obama’s meeting
with Sharif evidently occurred before the CIA went to Obama with specific
intelligence about Mehsud, and proposed to carry out a strike to kill him.

The CIA had an
institutional grudge to settle with Mehsud after he had circulated a video with
Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, the Jordanian suicide bomber who had talked
the CIA into inviting him to its compound at CampChapman
in Khost province, where he killed seven CIA officials and contractors on Dec.
30, 2009.

The CIA had already
carried out at least two drone strikes aimed at killing Mehsud in January 2010
and January 2012.

Killing Mehsud would
not reduce the larger threat of terrorism and would certainly trigger another
round of TTP suicide bombings in Pakistan’s largest cities in
retaliation.

Although it would
satisfy the CIA’s thirst for revenge and make the CIA and his administration
look good on terrorism to the U.S.
public, it would also make it impossible for the elected Pakistani government
to try a political approach to TTP terrorism.

Obama appears to have
been sympathetic to Sharif’s argument on terrorism and had no illusions that
one or a few more drone strikes against leading Taliban officials would prevent
the organization from continuing to mobilize its followers to carry out terror
attacks, including suicide bombers.

But the history of
the drone war in Pakistan
shows that the CIA has prevailed even when its proposed targets were highly
questionable. In March 2011, U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan Cameron Munter had
opposed a CIA proposal for a drone strike just as CIA contractor Raymond Davis
was about to be released from a jail in Lahore.

Munter had learned
that the CIA wanted the strike because it was angry at Pakistan’s ISI, which regarded the Haqqani group
as an ally, over Davis’s
incarceration, according to an AP story on Aug. 2, 2011. The Haqqani group was
heavily involved in fighting U.S.
and NATO troops in Afghanistan
but was opposed to the TTP’s terror attacks in Pakistan.

CIA Director Leon
Panetta rejected Munter’s objection to the strike, however, and Obama had
supported Panetta. It was later revealed that the strike had been based on
faulty intelligence. It was not a meeting of Haqqani network that was hit but a
conference of tribal leaders from all over the province on an economic issue.

But the CIA simply
refused to acknowledge its mistake and continued to claim to journalists that
only terrorists had attended the meeting.

After the strike, Obama had formalized the ambassador’s
authority to oppose a proposed drone strike, giving Munter what he called a
“yellow card.” But despite the evidence that the CIA had carried out a drone strike for parochial reasons rather
then an objective assessment of evidence, Obama
gave the CIA director the power to override an ambassadorial dissent, even if
the secretary of state supported the ambassador.

The extraordinary power of the CIA director
over the drone strike policy, which was formalized by Obama after that
strike, was evident in Obama’s decision to approve the CIA’s proposal for the
Mehsud strike. The director was now John
Brennan, who had shaped public opinion in favor of drone strikes through a
series of statements, interviews and leaks as Obama’s deputy national security
adviser from 2009 to 2013.

Even though Obama was
determined to phase out the drone war in Pakistan and apparently sympathized
with the need for the Pakistani government to end it within a matter of months,
he was unwilling to reject the CIA’s demand for a strike that once again
involved the agency’s parochial interests.

A late July 2013
survey had shown that 61 percent of U.S.
citizens still supported the use of drones. Having already shaped public
perceptions on the issue of terrorism, Obama allowed the interests of the CIA
to trump the interests of Pakistan
and the United States in
trying a different approach to Pakistan’s
otherwise intractable terrorism problem.

MEDIA
REPORTING DRONES

Rania Khalek, “Seeing What They Want to See in
Malala.” Extra! (Dec. 2013). “Media amplify Yousafzai’s criticism of Taliban,
not US drones.” The “extensive coverage
in US corporate media” of Malala Yousafzai “is well-deserved. But it stands in striking contrast to the
muted coverage” of “US drone strikes” in the meeting she had with Pres.
Obama. Khalek studied ABC, NBC, CBS, NYT, WP,
USA Today, and
LAT following the Oct. 11 meeting.

PHILIP ALSTON, REPORT BY UN SPECIAL RAPPORTEUR FOR
EXTRA-JUDICIAL KILLING

UN: Report of the Special Rapporteur on
Extrajudicial, Summary, or Arbitrary Executions

Share

State
policies permitting the use of targeted killings are often justified as a
necessary and legitimate response to "terrorism" and "asymmetric
warfare," but have had the very problematic effect of blurring and
expanding the boundaries of the applicable legal frameworks. This report
describes the new targeted killing policies and addresses the main legal issues
that have arisen.

In the legitimate struggle against
terrorism, too many criminal acts have been re-characterized so as to justify
addressing them within the framework of the law of armed conflict. New technologies,
and especially unarmed combat aerial vehicles or “drones”, have been added into
this mix, by making it easier to kill targets, with fewer risks to the
targeting State.

The result of this mix has been a highly
problematic blurring and expansion of the boundaries of the applicable legal
frameworks – human rights law, the laws of war, and the law applicable to the
use of inter-state force. Even where the laws of war are clearly applicable,
there has been a tendency to expand who may permissibly be targeted and under
what conditions. Moreover, the States concerned have often failed to specify
the legal justification for their policies, to disclose the safeguards in place
to ensure that targeted killings are in fact legal and accurate, or to provide
accountability mechanisms for violations. Most troublingly, they have refused
to disclose who has been killed, for what reason, and with what collateral
consequences. The result has been the displacement of clear legal standards
with a vaguely defined licence to kill, and the creation of a major
accountability vacuum.

In terms of the legal framework, many of
these practices violate straightforward applicable legal rules. To the extent
that customary law is invoked to justify a particular interpretation of an international
norm, the starting point must be the policies and practice of the vast majority
of States and not those of the handful which have conveniently sought to create
their own personalized normative frameworks. It should be added that many of
the justifications for targeted killings offered by one or other of the
relevant States in particular current contexts would in all likelihood not gain
their endorsement if they were to be asserted by other States in the future.

This report describes the publicly available
information about new targeted killing policies and addresses the main legal
issues that have arisen. It identifies areas in which legal frameworks have
been clearly violated or expanded beyond their permissible limits; where legal
issues are unclear, it suggests approaches which would enable the international
community to return to a normative framework that is consistent with its deep
commitment to protection of the right to life, and the minimization of
exceptions to that constitutive principle.

Reprievedelivers justice and
saves lives, from death row to GuantanamoBay.

Reprieveis a 501(c)(3),
non-profit organization established to provide direct services to people facing
the death penalty in United
States through a volunteer ...

Reprieve

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Reprieveis any of a number ofnot-for-profit organisationsaround the world which work against
the death penalty, with a particular focus on legal support for those facing
the death penalty or held insecret prisonsaround the world. The founding
Reprieve organisation is in the UK,
and there are also organisations in the United
States, Australia
and theNetherlands,
with additional supporters and volunteers worldwide.

Reprieve currently works to represent 15 prisoners in GuantánamoBay, as well as an evolving caseload of
death row clients around the world. It investigates international complicity in
renditions[3]and most recently, has started
working with the Foundation for Fundamental Rights[4]inPakistan,
aiming to create conversation around the use ofdronesthere.[5][6]

Reprieve Australia
was founded in 2001 by a group ofMelbournelawyers. It works to support those
facing the death penalty around the world, with a particular focus on work in
the Southern states of the US.

Reprieve Netherlands
is a new organisation, founded in 2006, twenty-four years after the Netherlands abolished the death penalty, by a
group of Dutch people who had previously worked in capital defence offices in
the United States.
It shares the goals of the other Reprieve organisations.

Hina Shamsi (@HinaShamsi) is the Director of the
ACLU’s National Security Project, which is dedicated to ensuring that U.S.
national security policies and practices are consistent with the Constitution,
civil liberties, and human rights. She has litigated cases upholding the
freedoms of speech and association, and challenging
targeted killing, torture, unlawful detention, and post-9/11 discrimination
against racial and religious minorities.

Her work includes a focus on
the intersection of national security and counterterrorism policies with
international human rights and humanitarian law. She previously worked as a
Staff Attorney in the National Security Project and was the Acting Director of
Human Rights First's Law & Security Program. She also served as Senior Advisor to the U.N. Special
Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Executions.

Hina appears regularly in the
media and has been quoted as a national security expert by numerous outlets
including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Associated Press, and
Reuters, and has appeared on MSNBC, Fox News, CNN, NPR, ABC News, and the BBC.
She is the author and coauthor of
publications on targeted killing, torture, and extraordinary rendition, and
has monitored and reported on the military commissions at GuantánamoBay. She is also a lecturer-in-law at ColumbiaLawSchool, where she teaches
a course in international human rights. Hina is a graduate of MountHolyokeCollege and Northwestern
University School of Law.

CENTER
FOR CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS

Dear Dick,

For the
past several years, CCR has been working to challenge one of the most
extreme claims of executive authority of the past decade: that the government
may kill its suspected enemies as it would in wartime, anywhere in the
world, based on its own say-so. The exercise of this unprecedented
assertion of power has, by conservative estimates, left over 3,000 people
dead outside of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq—in Pakistan, Yemen,
Somalia, and perhaps elsewhere. But exactly how many have been killed or
harmed, who they were, where they were killed or injured, and why, we do
not know, because the government will not say.

A ruling could come any day inAl-Aulaqi v. Panetta,
the lawsuit we have brought together with the ACLU challenging the legality
of U.S. drone strikes in
Yemen that killed three U.S.
citizens.

If you are
in Washington, D.C.,
join us onNovember
16 and 17forDrones Around the Globe:
Proliferation and Resistance, an international summit where
you can learn more about, and organize to end, unlawful killings by the United States.
CCR’s lead attorney in theAl-Aulaqicase, Pardiss Kebriaei, will be one of the speakers at the
conference. If you can’t join us in D.C., join us by watching the event
throughlive video stream.

This
gathering will also include the stories of people in Pakistan and Yemen who
have survived U.S. drone strikes or lost their loved ones to them, and
bring together grassroots activists, human rights advocates, lawyers,
writers, technology experts, artists, and musicians. Learn more about the
conference and register onCCR’s event calendar page.

Unlawful
killings aren’t the only “War on Terror” violations that CCR is fighting.
For several years, we have worked on behalf of Abu Ghraib torture victims
and sued the private military contractors involved in their abuse. On
October 29, we appealed a lower court’s dismissal ofour lawsuit by four Iraqi former
detainees against CACI. Following the Supreme Court decision inKiobel v Royal Dutch Petroleum,
limiting the ability of foreign victims of human rights abuses to seek
redress in U.S. court¸
the judge in the CACI case dismissed it largely based on the argument that
the torture took place in “Iraq,
a foreign sovereign.” Then, shockingly, CACI, a multi-billion dollar
corporation, asked that our clients – survivors of severe, sadistic torture
living on limited incomes – pay some of their legal costs. Unfortunately,
this request was granted.

We appealed
because the unlawful actions undertaken by a U.S.
corporation, in a U.S.-run detention center, during the U.S. occupation of Iraq in 2003-4, sufficiently “touch and
concern” the U.S.—the
legal standard set byKiobel.
As weblogged, “The
U.S. invaded Iraq, overthrew its government and created the Coalition
Provisional Authority (CPA) which was answerable to President George W.
Bush and directed by U.S. diplomat Paul Bremer. The CPA directed all
aspects of the Iraqi government and Iraqi society, including its prisons.”
Therefore, U.S.
courts must assert jurisdiction over the torture that took place at Abu
Ghraib prison. Last week, we were joined inour demand for justicefor torture survivors from Abu
Ghraib by six groups of experts who filed amicus briefs in support of the
appeal.

Whether
it’s the U.S.
government’s assertion of sweeping lethal executive power or military
contractors’ role in torture, CCR is committed to holding those who abuse
power accountable. Please considerdonating to CCRto help us in this critical work.

Thank you for your continued support.

Sincerely,Vincent Warren
Executive Director

About Us

The Center for Constitutional
Rights is dedicated to advancing and protecting the rights guaranteed by
the United States Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rig